The Key Essentials to a Trader’s Psyche #6: Paying Attention to Your Mindset

In order to develop the right mindset, to have a trader’s psyche, you need to know what to expect when day trading. You must be prepared for a variety of emotions so that you can monitor them instead of letting them control you. Only by staying on top of your emotions can you stay focused on the key to successful day trading: maintaining a consistently profitable long-term strategy in the middle of many smaller short-term wins and losses, even when these short-term outcomes seem overly distracting. To keep that focus, develop the traits of a trader’s psyche in yourself.

Successful traders pay attention to their emotions. They try to keep a distanced, critical eye on how they are reacting to the market in order to control their emotions instead of being controlled by them. This helps them stay cool, calm, and focused on their long-term goals instead of getting overly afraid or excited about the trades they are paying attention to at any given moment.

Furthermore, successful traders know what type of trader they are. They don’t force themselves to trade with methods or strategies that do not fit their personality. Too often, people will hear about another’s success and, whether out of envy or a lack of self-confidence, they feel compelled to copy that person.

This is a recipe for failure. You will only be successful with strategies that you understand and have confidence in. Almost any strategy can be successful if used in the right hands, and your goal should be to find out what works for you. There is no magic strategy or everyone would already be using it. But to know what works for you, you have to pay attention to your own comfort levels, your own insight and intuition (which strategies just seem to “click” for you), and what inspires confidence and security in you.

Finally, know when your emotions are becoming too powerful. Recognize when you are starting to trade based on a reaction rather than a plan. Successful traders take time off when they see themselves starting to act this way. They realize the importance of taking breaks from trading and the markets to clear their heads. They also know that stopping for awhile can help them regain focus on their long term goals and their overall strategy, not the success or failure of individual trades.

Keep your mindset focused on your system, not your bottom line. A series of losses may actually be more profitable in the long term if they teach you how to improve your system or help you identify a particular technique that works. This is what it means to keep a long-term perspective, and the most successful traders know that the long-term is the only thing that matters in day trading.

If you can integrate these insights into your own psychological mindset, you’ll gain a sig­nificant edge in the market. I can’t stress this enough: the right mindset is one of the keys to investment success, and most traders fail to understand this.